Journal ownership models

When people talk about journals as 'black boxes' usually they mean things like how reviewers are chosen, and the decisions made by editors. We don't talk much about journals as capitalist ventures, beyond decrying the cost of subscriptions (see my posts on Open Access) or predatory journals.  But there are many models of journal ownership and management, and if we understand them, we can make better sense of apparently puzzling decisions.  Here are five with which I am acquainted.  I'd be interested to know of others, or for corrections to my models.

Model A: the Learned Society journal:  this is a journal that is published by a learned society or disciplinary group.  Ownership is vested in the professional association, who contract with a publisher to publish the journal, and with a group of academics (often based in one department) to edit it for a number of years.  Some journals stay in certain foundational departments, more often they move around, and departments are invited to bid for them periodically.   Learned socities often use journal funds to pay for their administrative costs, run conferences, and other activities of benefit to their members.  Possible examples*: BJPS, ASR

Model B: The Association Journal: whereby a collective body or organization owns the journal, but editors are selected, rather than solicited.  A contract with a publisher ensures that the journal is published.  Funds again usually go to both administrative costs, editorial costs, and to support other endeavours of the owning group. Possible examples*:  African Affairs, Africa 

Model C: the Collective Model.  Ownership is vested in the editorial collective, and decisions about editors and often about papers are made collectively.  Both journals that I know which run on this model date from the 1970s. Again, a contract is negotiated with a publisher, and money is often used to run conferences, sponsor academic travel etc, as well as cover the costs of editing the journal.  Examples: JSAS, ROAPE

Model D:  the Private Ownership model. The journal is owned by an individual and profits accrue to them.  That individual might contract out the editorial work, or take it on themselves.  Possible examples*: TWQ

Model E: the Publisher-Owner model.  The publisher 'owns' the journal and contracts with an editor or editors to run the journal. Possible examples*: JMAS

In the case of models D and E, I presume that proceeds of the journal pay salaries and other expenses, but are less likely to support conferences and other activities, but I may be wrong.  Certainly editors could negotiate such agreements into their contracts, if publishers were amenable, but I'm not aware of examples that do this.  It's also difficult to know whether journals are Model D or E, since we're not usually privy to their contractual arrangements.

How any of these groups relate to their editorial boards is generally unrelated to their ownership, with the exception of Model C, where the editorial board is resposinble for both organizational and editorial decision making.  In Models D and E editorial boards usually serve at the pleasure of the editor.

Finally, peer review is unrelated to both ownership and management.

*This is based on the best of my knowledge. Please let me know if I'm wrong, so I can correct it.

Twitter as an academic search tool = user beware

I'm delighted that journals are using social media to promote journal articles.  It's a brilliant idea.  @T&F_Africa is really pioneering this, at least in my field,   tweeting links to pertinent, if not necessarily recent, articles.  I quite often retweet these to my students.  But the last two times I have followed their links, I've had second thoughts about those retweets.


The first time, it was a link to an article about Islam and the WoT in Mali. Fascinating stuff, and from 2007, so a good background to the current crisis.  But the more I read the paper, the more concerned I became. It's a thoughtful piece, which draws some reasonable conclusions.  But nowhere are we told anything about the author or his research.  We don't know if he's ever visited Mali, if he speaks the languages, if he did research there via a research grant, or while in the US military. The paper is reasonably referenced - albeit entirely to secondary sources -  but I can't judge its value, or robustness, without knowing something about how the analysis was generated.

Today @T&F_Africa  tweeted a link to a paper on 'ethnic terrorism' in Kenya.  Interesting, I thought, if a bit tendentious.  But again, while this paper does give us the author's affiliation, we have no way of judging how much of an 'expert' he is.  Did he spend several months in the field?  or is it 'armchair' research from the comforts of home?  Again, the footnotes seem to be in order, but with no discussion of methodology, I'm left wondering why this author is positioning himself as an 'expert' in this sensitive field.

I don't really blame the authors for these oversights, but what were the editors doing letting articles get published without such basic information?  Do they think about how to strengthen articles? how to make them more robust and effective?

There's a comment somewhere in my twitterstream from an academic saying 'I only ever get boilerplate letters from editors'.  It worries me that this may be becoming standard.  Surely editors have a duty of care to their authors to help them improve articles?

Or am I being too precious, and as long as the footnotes are there, anything goes?

Quality Research and Real Access: confronting the myths of the OA Evangelists

Readers of the Guardian's science blog have been told that "Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral".  The writer, @miketaylor,  makes an impassioned case for Open Access (OA),  but a number of his premises simply don't hold water in the fields of humanities and social sciences.  Indeed, they reveal a remarkable level of naivety about how academics 'sink or swim' in the gamble that is a modern career.  If the utopia that is described here really existed then we wouldn't need to worry.  Maybe it does in the sciences -- certainly they are more used to the idea of paying to publish -- but I'm afraid it's not like that for many scholars. 

A lot of the issues that I want to raise have already been discussed in the 'comments' section, so right now, I just want to focus on two inter-related points:  how to best promote scholarship and the role of learned societies.  A number of us have flagged concerns about the impact of Gold OA on the broader academic environment.  Mike says that "the purpose of a scholarly society is to promote scholarship, which is best done by making that scholarship available".  That's hard to disagree with. But is 'availability' really the best way of producing quality work?  To my mind, this is at best naive, and at worst, neo-liberal.  It presumes that every scholar has an equal opportunity to produce good work, and that all that 'good work' needs is to be published.  

But that may not bear much resemblance to the experience of early career researchers. Those of us lucky enough to be educated at top-notch research intensive institutions will have been nurtured in fertile environments -- invited speakers at research seminars, conferences held on site, or travel funded to them, networking with high-level scholars, and a stimulating environment full of other post-grads.  Hopefully, we also have supervisors who give unstintingly of themselves, provide us with support in designing our research, and feed their wisdom into our draft papers.  But for others, lacking this stimulating and supportive environment, the decisions about how to draft papers, where to submit, and how to develop a research portfolio seem like a very strange world indeed.  And this is where learned societies can and do play a fantastic role - through post-grad networks, workshops, and networking opportunities.  All of these contribute intangibly but very substantially to enabling students to navigate the murky waters of early career scholarship.  

One of the drivers of the OA evangelicals is the assumption that scholars are prevented from contributing to academic debate because of their inability to access journals. But, while access to the most recent journals is essential (and many commercial and not-for-profit publishers do enable this in developing countries), a focus on this over-simplifies the process whereby we are initiated into the arcane rituals of scholarship. 

For those who have 'made it' it is perhaps hard to imagine just how puzzling our little world seems to outsiders, or those just peeking in.  But having run workshops for students and recently completed doctoral candidates as well as many 'meet the editors' events at conferences, I can assure you that the rumours and innuendo and half-truths that circulate about how journals really work are manifold.   

In a reply to one of my comments, Mike says " who ploughs three to five years of their life into a research project, but doesn't bother to take three to five hours to investigate the journal they're thinking of sending the paper to?"  It's not that people don't look into these things, but that 'we' pick up on many many clues that we can 'read' because we've been circulating around, chatting with other PGs and that we 'know' the names in the field.  That comes from familiarity with a certain discourse, which is only achieved by access and inclusion to it - and that's more than just reading the journals on-line (although that sure helps).

So, if we really want journals to publish the best research, and stimulate the best debates, that means enabling everyone to participate in it - and that 'participation' starts way before the paper is submitted to the journal.  As a journal editor everyday I would receive papers by bright, motivated students and young academics which were often not even fit to be sent for peer review, much less published.  This is not a reflection on the ability of those students, nor simply a result of their limited access to recent academic work.  For the most part, the problems were much more fundamental and related to the research design, the understanding of how to engage in an academic debate -- the sorts of things that are picked up through circulating in an academic milieu. 

My experience as a journal editor convinced me that the best scholarship comes from supporting a diverse mix of scholars from as wide a background as possible to make their contributions, Learned societies play a crucial role in this, and disregarding it, as the Finch report did, risks making scholarship less inclusive, in the name of 'openess'.  

OA is coming.  Learned societies will adapt, and we can only hope that some funding will come through so that networking sessions, workshops, conference travel grants etc continue to enable a wide range of new scholars to join our ranks. But let's stop pretending that Open Access will  miraculously solve the problems of publishing, library budgets, and access, because - in the real world - access is about more than just being able to read what someone has written. 

The Academic Maelstrom

Some very patient admin people at uni are chasing me for 'course monitoring forms'. These are reports where we sum up our teaching from last year in 1 page - student feedback, our reflections, and plans for change.  A great idea, right?  Well, yes. If you actually find time to collect the data (note to self: look for forms in pile on desk), reflect on it, and remember which course is which.

But instead, I'm standing at the sink, washing dishes, with a feverish toddler running about at my feet, trying to decide what other overdue item to drop down the priority list, so that I can get these admin folk off my back.  

I ought to be replying to panicked student emails about dissertations, or sending (late) requests to the library to scan chapters for next semester's courses, or chasing things for students for whom I am a 'personal tutor', or planning the dissertation workshops for tomorrow, or reading PhD student chapters (5 waiting at last count), or writing letters of reference for former students, or reading UG dissertation proposals, or writing book reviews (CJAS and African Affairs - I've not forgotten, honest), or trying to get lecture notes up on Learn, or that article I promised a journal on OA, or the two book chapters I rashly agreed to write, or revising the consultancy report..... 

And that's just my 'must do' list of things that are already overdue, and doesn't even begin to get near the stack of books I want to read, the funding calls to peruse and pursue, the academic blogs to read (where *do* people find time to write them?), planning teaching for next year.....

Open access links

I need somewhere to post links to OA stuff, and until I get better organised, that's going to be here:

Recent articles: (24 July 2012)


UK government will enforce open access to development research

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/25/uk-government-open-access-development-research

Is the Academic Publishing Industry on the Verge of Disruption?  US News
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/23/is-the-academic-publishing-industry-on-the-verge-of-disruption_print.html

Research paywalls tumble down  Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9422420/Research-paywalls-tumble-down.html

Brought to book Academic journals face a radical shake-up Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/21559317

Why panning for gold may be detrimental to open access research The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jul/23/finch-report-open-access-research/print

Recent (thoughtful) blogs:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jul/23/finch-report-open-access-research
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/07/23/academic-research-shouldnt-be-made-freely-available-to-all/

From the publisher's perspective:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/07/23/complying-with-the-rcuk-mandate-or-not/
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/07/16/predictable-problems-the-uks-move-to-open-access/

Critical perspectives from OA supporters: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/jul/17/uk-to-support-open-access
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-finch-report-and-its-implications.html

Here's The Guardian article that started all the hoo-ha: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-british-scientific-research

And the THES's first coverage - they have also published some shorter interesting interventions:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=420573  

Open access: impoverishing academia?

We all love to hate the big publishers that are bankrupting our libraries (is it true that UK universities only spent 2.7% of their budgets on libraries? something's wrong there).  But not all publishers are exploitative - many University publishers run as not-for-profit corporations. And publishers don't retain all the profits of journals. Far from it. 

I've been associated with two journals which have completely different models:  the learned society model and the collective ownership model. In both these models, the publishers have a contract to publish the journal, which usually guarantees them a % of the profits, the rest is passed on to the learned society or collective group of academics.

Learned societies, which rely on these not-inconsiderable sums to run conferences and support their administrative overheads, would also suffer under the proposed Gold Open Access business model.  A journal which publishes 20-40 articles in a year would have a maximum income of £40 000 - £80 000, if authors paid £2000 to publish with them (some are arguing this amount would be much lower). That may be plenty for a publisher that owns and runs hundreds of journals.    But it will be a blow to the learned society, which relies on their income for many good purposes - usually using it to subsidize conferences, and sometimes to provide honoraria for editors and book review editors. 

In particular, collectively owned African studies journals such as those started in the 1970s have used the 'windfall' profits of publishing to sponsor travel of African academics to attend conferences and present papers, or send their members to attend conferences and workshops.  

These journals also tend to have extremely reasonable subscriptions, which are set at cost for members, or even subsidized.  If they lose subscription income from libraries  then small grants that have sustained annual conferences and one-off workshops may disappear, along with the ability of learned societies to administer their membership and represent their interests.  Academia will be poorer, because these journals will pay the price for the rapacious behaviour of Elsevier and a few other 'big' publishers. 

The Finch report, rather condescendingly, tells learned societies to 'diversity their income' as if they've not been doing this for years? Yet more additional burdens for the academic community to shoulder, as we struggle to in search of an elusive work-life balance. 

Gold open access: a pathway to two tier publishing?

Proposals to embrace open access and throw open the doors of academe have been met with great enthusiasm. 'Progressive' scholars (and everyone frustrated by paywalls and limited journal holdings) has jumped for joy.  But has too little thought has been given to some of the implications?

Given the past record of this (and previous) governments on Higher Education and Research kowtowing to big business, surely we should be a little more cautious, and not just think 'oooh, how nice, this time I agree with their policy'.  There's a catch in it.  Those of us in academic jobs in UK universities don't stand to lose much, but I don't think this is a win-win situation. There are likely to be losers as well - if we all just jump onto Gold Access without questioning its business model as closely as we question the Elsevier approach. 

In the recent Guardian piece, Universities and Science Minister David Willets, endorses the so-called ‘gold open access’ model, preferred by the large publishing conglomerates.  ‘Gold’ OA changes the business model from one where readers pay for access to the output of research, to one where scholars pay to publish work – anywhere from a few hundred pounds to £2000.  The ‘green open access model’ preferred by most of those who work in and advocate for open access, instead requires researchers to make their work available inrepositories – such as those most Universities are already establishing fordealing with the REF. 

Some large granting agencies, like the Wellcome Trust, already set aside funds for OA up front fees, being willing to pay to ensure that research they fund is as widely accessible as possible.  Other researchers may be able to include such amounts in research grants, or request support through their universities.  But for self-funded Phd students, independent scholars, and contract staff the implications are less clear – how will they find the money to publish in these ‘gold’ journals?  Will their fees be waived? If so, on what terms?  And who will decide? Will journals have annual quotas or budgets? 

But it is most telling that the Finch report and responses to it look only at the implications of OA for UK academia.  We assume that the rest of the world will be grateful to have access to all of our publications (and wish they’d reciprocate).  But what about scholars from developing countries who want to publish in OA journals?  Some area studies journals have already begun planning for this, with plans to waive fees, but will disciplinary journals follow suit?

Or do we risk establishing a two-tier publishing system?  Not the one we have at present where OA journals are too often seen as inferior new-comers, but one where some scholars can only afford to publish in ‘old-model’ journals, while the rest pay to publish in the ‘Gold’ band.

Given that UK university libraries struggle to pay journal subscriptions the widespread belief that scholars in developing countries can’t access journals published here is unsurprising. In reality, many publishers make their resources available free or heavily discounted although the range of options can be tricky to navigate – and it all depends on reliable electricity and internet access. But under the ‘Gold’ OA scheme, we could have the ultimate irony of African scholars able to read our research, but unable to publish their own alongside it. 

Open access is coming; the internet and our expectations of instant access to documents makes it inevitable, but in moving towards a global flow of research, we need to consider the losers, as well as the winners, and seek to avoid creating new divisions and hierarchies within academia.